Brown writes that much of the day was taken up with endless politically correct disputation about whether this or that community was adequately represented. She relates a hysterical example that hugely delayed a panel discussion featuring EEOC commissioner Chai Feldblum, a lesbian and leading light of the gay rights movement. And then:

It was one of many mind-boggling moments during the summit, an event filled with both thought-provoking speakers and brain-numbing PC platitudes; heartwarming displays of how far society has come on LGBT issues mixed with troubling signs of where the wind is blowing. It’s important to note that the summit was organized by centrist publication The Atlantic and underwritten by big businesses such as Deloitte, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, and the American Federation of Teachers. It featured federal employees, former and current legislators, and one Sex in the City star. Nothing about this event could be described as remotely “fringe.” [Emphasis mine. — RD]

Brown says that David Boaz and Andrew Sullivan, both gay men who have for years advocated for gay rights, stood out from most of the speakers because they defended religious liberty at the conference. They were alone. Reports Brown:

Again and again, people scoffed at the ideas of religious liberty and of furthering LGBT equality via non-governmental means.

In contrast, Boaz stated: “I think we have millions of small businesses, and I would like to leave the heavy hand of government out of their relationships with their customers and their employees as much as possible.”

Again and again, people scoffed at the ideas of religious liberty and of furthering LGBT equality via non-governmental means.

Feldblum, however, dismissed the idea that religious beliefs could ever justify discrimination. “When someone has not been educated [about tolerance of LGBT individuals] and wants to keep discriminating,” she said, “there is only one federal government, there is only one state government, one local government that can say: We will not tolerate this in our society.”

The EEOC just brought its first two cases alleging discrimination against a transgender person, she noted, and while one of the employers had already settled, the other, a funeral home, is fighting back.

With a religious exemption to non-discrimination laws, the funeral home owner “could say, ‘well, actually, we’re religiously based,'” said Feldblum, raising her arms high and rolling her eyes. “It’s a funeral home! We do not want to allow that and the only thing that can protect us is a law that doesn’t have [a religious] exemption.”

Chai Feldblum isn’t a minor figure. She is the head of the on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, having been appointed by President Obama, and will be in that post until her term expires in 2018. Long before she was elevated to the EEOC chairmanship, Feldblum was known for her view that there are almost no situations in which disputes between religious liberty and gay rights should be resolved in favor of religious liberty.

It fell to Andrew Sullivan (whose voice I miss more and more every week) to defend freedom to the crowd. You really should read the whole Reason report to hear what he had to say. It includes a link to Andrew’s presentation, in which he says that the LGBT-industrial complex needs to keep the bogeyman of Oppression alive (“These people’s lives and careers and incomes depend on the maintenance of discrimination and oppression”), and says that religious liberty is just about the most important American freedom.

The hard truth is that Andrew Sullivan, alas for us all, is irrelevant to the debate now. When I saw him this spring in Boston, he told me that he can’t go on some campuses now because the gay left hates him for speaking out for religious liberty, and in particular for Brendan Eich. Think about that: fewer than four years ago, the president of the United States was formally committed to maintaining traditional marriage in law. Now, we have Court-mandated gay marriage from coast to coast, and Andrew Sullivan, who has done as much or more than any single person to make that happen, is now regarded by the gay rights movement as some sort of reactionary because of his liberal views.

The Law of Merited Impossibility: It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.

In the comments on that post, several progressives said, in effect, “Hey, the government gave Christian schools what they asked for, so what’s the problem?” Others said, “Hey, if the colleges want the right to discriminate, they don’t deserve federal money.” You see in those responses precisely the Law of Merited Impossibility. We have been to this rodeo so many times that religious and social conservatives who think the status quo will hold and these LGBT activists won’t get what they want, eventually, are fools. The next Democratic presidential administration will stack the relevant posts with Chai Feldblums. The next Republican administration, though unlikely to be as radical, will be, like the Congressional GOP, half-hearted and confused on this issue, and will just want it to go away.

When I was in DC this fall, I learned from knowledgeable sources that the Congressional Republicans will do nothing for religious liberty; for them, they only see down sides to engaging on the issue. When GOP presidential candidates like Marco Rubio say they’re going to appoint SCOTUS justices who will overturn Obergefell, don’t you believe them. It’s not going to happen. No GOP president is going to burn political capital on this cause, especially given that gay marriage is supported by an increasing majority of Americans. If there is hope for religious conservatives on this issue, it’s that actively or passively, a Republican administration and Republican Congress will slow the March Of Progress.

But it will march on, because the sexual progressives have captured the heights of the culture. I’ll give you two recent examples. This kind of thing, happening over and over in the news and entertainment media, is one of the main reasons we have gay marriage now. They’re doing it for transgenders, and they’re not going to stop.

The first example is a story that appeared as a centerpiece this weekend on The New York Times‘s website; I don’t know what its placement was in the print edition, but online, it was given the most important slot, indicative of the priority with which the Times crusades for LGBT issues. For readers who dismiss what the Times has to say on anything as a provincial New York point of view, you have to understand that just as you have to read the Wall Street Journal to get a sense of what the financial elites are thinking, you have to read the Times to get a sense of what the cultural elites (in media, government, law, academia, etc.) are thinking.

Seizing the opportunity, Ms. Nimmons was about to become one of the first low-income New Yorkers to undergo a genital reconstruction paid for by Medicaid. In a few hours, if all went well, her body would be aligned with her identity for the first time, and she would no longer be “a chick with a wiener,” in her words, but “a woman in mind, body and soul, before the Lord and before the law.”

Peering under the sheet that draped her that early October morning at a hospital outside Philadelphia, Ms. Nimmons bade farewell to what she called “my friend” — that “extra part” for which she was pronounced male at birth. Tattooed on her right forearm was her birth name, “Jerome,” complete with quotation marks.

“When I lay down and when I wake up, I’ll be a whole new creature, a whole new being,” Ms. Nimmons declared. “Out with the old, in with the new.”

Over the course of this year, Ms. Nimmons has often said she never expected to make it to 40, much less to “complete” the long, lonely journey from Jerome through Meeka (her interim name) and Magnolia Thunderpussy (her drag name) to Kricket.

Life after vaginoplasty is filled with opportunity, she finds:

Shortly before her surgery, she had unexpectedly fallen into a relationship with a 24-year-old transgender man who, as Ms. Nimmons characterized it, was “still biologically female.” This confused her.

“I’ve never had a liking to women my whole life, but he’s special,” she said.

Magnolia Thunderpussy, culture-war gladiator.

You have to get it straight in your head that Magnolia Thunderpussy, aka Kricket Nimmons, really is a hero to the cultural left, and anyone who doubts her and fails to endorse her project are villains.

The next example is Ariel Levy’s fantastic New Yorker profile of Jill Soloway, creator of the TV series Transparent, in which Jeffrey Tambor portrays an elderly man who transitions into life as an elderly woman. Transparent is not a fringe show; this year, it had 11 Emmy nominations and five wins, making it one of the most honored programs in the industry. (And like they said about the Velvet Underground in its day, itThe profile is fantastic in that it is filled with rich details about how jaw-droppingly insane Soloway and her world are. Excerpts:

Sometimes, though, Soloway sounds not entirely unlike that women’s-studies professor she played. “A patriarchal society can’t really handle that there’s such a thing as a vagina,” she said. “The untrustworthy vagina that is discerning-receiving.” Soloway, who recently turned fifty, was wearing leggings and blue nail polish and a baseball cap that said “Mister.” She sped past a stretch of Craftsmen bungalows, whose front yards were studded with bicycles, jade plants, and toys. “So you can want sex, you can want to be entered, and then a minute later you can say, ‘Stop—changed my mind,’ ” she continued. “That is something that our society refuses to allow for. You don’t feel like it now? You’re shit out of luck. You know why? Because you have a pussy! To me, that is what’s underneath all this gender trouble: most of our laws are being formed by people with penises.”

Most of our entertainment, of course, has also been formed by people with penises, and Soloway is trying to change that: through her hiring practices, her choice of subject matter, and the way she thinks and acts at work.

This description of the show’s characters and how they behave; “Maura” is Tambor’s male-to-female character:

One consequence of rebirth is a second coming of age, and both Maura and her children act out with the heedless egocentrism of adolescents. The eldest sibling, Sarah, leaves her husband to pursue an affair with her college girlfriend, after they reunite at the school that their children attend. In the second season, their relationship moves from illicit to domestic, and Sarah finds herself trapped in her own escape plan, as restless and unmoored as ever. Her brother, Josh, keeps accidentally getting women pregnant and pitching fits: he throws a chair at his boss, and shrieks at other drivers from behind the wheel. Ali, the youngest, drifts between interests and lovers, experimenting with drugs, lesbianism, yellow eye shadow, and academia. (“You can not do anything!” Maura explodes at her.)

The upside of immaturity is guileless delight, and “Transparent” has a child’s sense of amazement about the world—especially secret places where different rules apply. Maura seems free for the first time at a sylvan cross-dressing camp, where she bikes along the dirt road wearing a purple dress. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival—which ended this summer, after forty years, largely because of conflicts over whether trans women ought to be included—is re-created in the second season as a muddy, magical oasis where women receive visions by staring into bonfires. “I’m always trying to bring the concept of play into the female gaze,” Soloway told me.

There is even an innocence to the sex scenes, which are radical and plentiful. Sarah gets a spanking—but in the forest, with a grin on her face. In Season 2 (which will become available online on December 11th), Maura has sex for the first time since her transition, with an earth mother played by Anjelica Huston. She says aloud what so many virgins have said in their minds: “I don’t know what to do.”

And:

In the utopia that Soloway envisions, I suggested, there would be no need to transition, because there would be no gender in the first place. Soloway parsed it differently: “In a few years, we’re going to look back and say, ‘When we were little, we used to think that all women had vaginas and all men had penises, but now, of course, we know that’s not true.’ ”

Eventually we learn that Soloway has just left her husband and their seven-year-old son, and taken up with a lesbian poet, who is over the moon about how nothing binds our behavior except our own will. I urge you strongly to read the entire profile, because the ending will hit you like a thunderbolt, and tell you exactly what we are dealing with here. Trust me on this. Read it.

Yes, this stuff is deeply distasteful, but attention must be paid. I hate using some of this language on this blog, but the fact that it’s appearing at all in The New York Times reveals something about the state of our culture — and again, attention must be paid.

Jill Soloway is an increasingly influential culture creator — and she has powerful media institutions like The New York Times on her side. What’s going on in our culture is far, far beyond politics, but it will drive politics and law, and not in a direction that bodes well for religious liberty. At the very least.

This is not primarily a culture war over political power. This is spiritual warfare, as the Soloway piece makes plain for those with eyes to see. A political response is necessary, but a political response alone is radically insufficient, in part because it’s nothing but a delaying action. This Weimar America madness has to run its course. We religious conservatives had all better do everything we can to protect our institutions and our families from it. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s not going to get any easier as the years go by, no matter who sits in the White House, and we had better prepare ourselves.

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171 Responses to The Next Culture War Front

I think you can draw similarities between “gay marriage” and “interracial marriage.”

1. The rationale, damage to society, was the quite similar in both cases (the purity of the white race was cited vs. the sanctity of marriage).

2. While, prior to the SCOTUS ruling, gay marriage was not criminalized, there are still, today anti-sodomy laws on the books of many states that do result in people being thrown in jail (primarily used against gays). The root of these laws is the same as the anti-gay marriage argument (that it is bad for society to have people doing ‘that’).

Omnivore, the operative word is “I think.” Youre thinking is either imaginative or oblivious, perhaps both.

The so-called “purity of the white race” is genetic and biological in nature. The purported “hazard” has nothing in common with the question, do two people of the same sex constitute a marriage.

It is entirely possible to abolish anti-sodomy laws, without issuing marriage licenses for those so engaged. “It is bad for society” is your own straw man. I’m all for Lawrence v. Texas and oppose the argument that there is a constitutional MANDATE that marriage licenses be issued to same sex couples — so obviously, its not necessary to think “both are bad for society.”

One can play endless semantical games glued together with one’s own unalloyed feelings. But there is no substance to that, and no reasoned argument.

“But I think…”

What J and Eamus miss is that people may adhere to religion first and foremost because they believe it to be true. And whatever benefits flow from religious practice may be those outline by C.S. Lewis in his discussion of the Tao… reality is shaped in such a manner that certain behavior and thought processes and perhaps even prayer life conforms to the shape of things and produces a more satisfactory life. Advances in science might improve the general odds, but would not render this obsolete. Of course you can’t KNOW this is true, you can only believe, or not. But belief may be found quite satisfactory.

I think you can draw similarities between “gay marriage” and “interracial marriage.”

This discussion has been already made here, and I think that the almost unanimous answer is “no”.

And, anyway, “interracial marriage” is a very local issue, in space and time, in the story of marriage. In a broader historical perspective, is just another regulation of marriage. Other forms of regulations included mandatory marriage (e.g., under Augustus), restriction based upon social class, wealth, nationality, and so on so forth.

The point of forbidding “interracial marriage” is not that different races “couldn’t marry”, but that “they better not”. This didn’t change the meaning of the word “marriage”, which is something two people can do also without the rules of a State.

On the other hand, two men or two women cannot marry, unless you change the meaning of the word.

I’m telling you this not to resume a tiresome discussion, but just because it’s a perspective you might well consider.

1. Religion X produces saints, mystics, moral leaders/elites. I.e. outstanding people.
2. Actual divine intervention in agreement with Religion X is positively in evidence. (Theism is warranted.)
3. Religion X is basis of a strong therapeutic community.
4. Religion X is basis of an ethically/morally strong and respectable community.
5. There are good reasons to think that a deity exists in absence of evidence of intervention or particular evidence for Religion X. (Deism is warranted.)

Yours is an interesting, and maybe at least in part correct, analysis of the workings of the secularist-producing machine.

However, it doesn’t indict religion, but the intellectual and moral poverty of our times.

1. What is being said (literally) and
2. What is driving the conversation (emotionally)

The idea that “purity of the white race” is a genetics issue is willfully blind.

This is a speech from the House floor in 1913. The objection isn’t about genetics.

“Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant. It is subversive to social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy, and ultimately this slavery to black beasts will bring this nation to a fatal conflict”

Secondly, while I think it’s true that you can abolish anti-sodomy laws without issuing marriage licenses, I believe it’s clear that the objections to both of these are being driven from the same place.

That we have eased off, societally, on gay sex but not on gay marriage is, itself, just a point in time. The objections to both still clearly remain.

Finally, on the topic of the “word marriage” I think it’s clear that this isn’t an argument about the defense of the dictionary–but rather the defense of the institution. Changing the definition of marriage isn’t the underlying issue: it’s having marriages that people feel are wrong in society.

So, I read through to the end as advised (or admonished) and no thunderbolt arrived. Get over yourselves, religious brethren!
And yes it can be said that objections to gay marriage or to inter-racial marriage are not the same thing exactly, but they both seem very like trying to legislate other people’s choices because someone fears them. Not a good basis for public policy, I think.

I don’t know if anyone has remarked on this bit from the New Yorker piece yet (I didn’t get any hits searching the comments for “vetted”), but it stopped me in my tracks:

“Every decision on the show is vetted by Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker, trans activists and artists whose work about their relationship appeared in the most recent Whitney Biennial. ‘We monitor the politics of representation—if we catch things in the writing stage, it’s kind of optimal because then there’s time to shape it…'”

What’s astounding is how plainly and openly they lay this out: their show has political officers whose explicit function is to keep everything perfectly in line with ideological goals.

(Can you imagine how the average artsy person would react if these two people were, say, traditionalist Catholic activists rather than trans activists?)

This is a powerful factor in the shifting of opinion in this country. The average person is marinaded in our entertainment media, and that media has been working steadily to construct an alternate reality of their own devising. And unlike the old physical Potemkin village, the digital Potemkin village has the power to not just fool people about present reality, but bend future reality towards its fantasy.

“This is a powerful factor in the shifting of opinion in this country. The average person is marinaded in our entertainment media, and that media has been working steadily to construct an alternate reality of their own devising.”

Right, and it doesn’t take the average person being a “mindless robot,” as someone said on another thread, for this to occur. It’s like mass advertising — it works in the long run by swaying opinion and steering people in small ways, which nevertheless add up.

~~Finally, on the topic of the word “marriage” I think it’s clear that this isn’t an argument about the defense of the dictionary–but rather the defense of the institution. Changing the definition of marriage isn’t the underlying issue: it’s having marriages that people feel are wrong in society.~~~

Sorry, but this is patently not the case. A large part of the traditionalist objection is the fact that the institution is being redefined in a way that makes the term meaningless. The traditional marriage and family have long been the target of the cultural left. But they learned rather early on that attacking it directly didn’t get them very far. So instead, the plan became one of attenuating it to the point where it could mean virtually anything. And of course if a word can mean anything in reality it means nothing.

I’m innately suspicious of the Big-Plan Explanation (especially one that requires the chipping away at institutions over years and years). According to everyone, everybody else has an operational conspiracy up and running and has managed to orchestrate policy makers at the highest levels of government and culture.

I suspect that, as Andrew Sullivan has said repeatedly (And in the spirit of occam’s razor): gays (some, anyway) just want to get married.

I don’t think this requires a coordinated plot.

The fact remains, though, that the fear *is* damage to the institution and therefore the culture (on a social and spiritual level)–whether by “making the term ‘marriage’ meaningless” or having gay-culture out in the open and with government approval–or whatever. If you don’t think it’ll hurt the institution of marriage you wouldn’t care about it.

This cultural-damage argument (and I’m not innately hostile to it–but the damage mechanism and causality needs to be shown) is the same one that was used against interracial marriage.

Well, that and the argument that interracial marriage was (literally) against God (there was a heavy component of religion against miscegenation).

The objection that ‘objection to interracial marriage is time bound, local and aberrant’ is only true if you restrict yourself to looking at Christianity. In Judaism, to say nothing of Hinduism, interracial marriage has been a preoccupation for a very long time, as Noah Millman points out. Look at the Old Testament (which is of course not normative for Christians, but it is for Jews).

For sure history and civilizations are ridden with regulations of marriage of all sorts, on bases such as ethnicity, race, religion, wealth, class, age, nationality, guild, number of spouses, and so on so forth.
What I’m arguing is that all of those restrictions declared some kind of marriages unlawful because of inappropriateness, not because “they were not marriages”.
But the definition of marriage as between man and woman has always been a given fact, outside the domain of the law.

And, TheOmnivore

Look, a long, broad and deep discussion about the post-modern version of nominalism has been carried out in this forum especially before Obergefell, including the spiritual, social and cultural implications of it.
I refer you to those threads to have an idea of the positions.

There have been Christianity based objections to interracial marriage, segregation, miscegenation, and so on for a long time. Today, even. Pew research shows that a percentage of Americans (mostly in the South) are still against it (it does not say why).

“According to everyone, everybody else has an operational conspiracy up and running and has managed to orchestrate policy makers at the highest levels of government and culture.”

Can’t speak for all traditionalists, and I know there are some conspiracy theorists among us, but I don’t see the thing rising to the level of conspiracy. The movement is “coordinated,” not in the sense of a plot, but in the sense that a large highly influential group of people have both common goals and general agreement on the means by which to achieve them. Think Gramsci, not Lenin.

“This cultural-damage argument (and I’m not innately hostile to it–but the damage mechanism and causality needs to be shown) is the same one that was used against interracial marriage.

Well, that and the argument that interracial marriage was (literally) against God (there was a heavy component of religion against miscegenation).”

The Southern American Christian opposition to marriage between blacks and whites is limited in scope both regionally and chronologically. It was nowhere near universal, and it was not remotely as doctrinally embedded as the Christian belief in traditional heterosexual marriage. In short, it appeared briefly, and as a result of cultural pressures, in what theologically was a backwater of a backwater.

Comparisons of the two things which find some alleged common ground between them are almost always ignorant of the history of one or the other or both.

(This is true for slavery as well, by the way. For an explanation of this see Mark Noll’s essential The Civil War As A Theological Crisis)

Omnivore exemplifies why most people got sick of SDS circa 1970, as it turned into an endless debating society in which everybody wanted their turn to ramble about “I think” and nobody wanted to identify any objective criteria by which others could evaluate their thoughts. Meetings turned into “dictatorship of the night owls,” in which those who stayed up until 4:00 am found themselves a voting majority, even though almost everyone had gone home and gone to bed.

Omni does offer some empirics as to the historical motives for concern about “purity of the white race.” It was not a genetic issue in the sense that the biological dynamics of actual gene function provided serious scientific evidence that there was anything desirable about racial purity. It was a claim based on reference to genetic expression. As the quote omnivore provides clearly states, there was an underlying assumption that “whites” and “blacks” constituted distinct sub-species, one being “supreme” and the other being “beasts.”

Now, we all know that men and women are part of the same species, but are quite distinct categories within that species. (We’ll leave some of the wilder and wierder flights of fancy of the trans-fat movements out of this for now).

So we have a fanciful distinction of the human race into two sub-species, and we have the very real and empirical division of the human race into two sexes.

After that Omni degenerates back into “I think” and “I believe its clear.” Without a bit more substance, this is so much exhaled carbon dioxide blowing in the wind. It is no basis for sound public policy, although Omni can set whatever policy he likes in his own living room.

Omni closes with a statement that is plainly false, and would be mendacious if not for the obvious delusion that he believes it. As Giuseppe observes, “The point of forbidding “interracial marriage” is not that different races “couldn’t marry”, but that “they better not”. It was not about the definition of marriage.

The meaning of words reflects a common understanding of what the institution those words describe IS. Words have no independent substance — they DESCRIBE something that is real, or, they describe a thought that is mythical and has no substance at all. (Am I being nominalist, or anti-nominalist?) Marriage is “the union of a man and a woman.” If someone says “well, I’m a man in love with another man, and we want to marry too,” it is a legitimate answer to respond “But two men are not the substance of what a marriage IS.” That is more than the word — the words reflect the real things being discussed.

Changing the definition of marriage is a very real issue — whether people feel that same sex couples are wrong in society or not. For example, any standard biology textbook is sufficient to establish that all species more complex than a sponge are heteronormative, and also that homosexuality is in many instances likely to be of no more significance than that a few proteins are shaped a little differently — deviations from the norm are likely in any complex and unstable universe of chemical reactions.

For an individual who finds their sexual hormones focus on the body of their own sex, not the opposite, well, that’s the only life they have to live. If we can, we should make room for them to live their life. That is my opinion, the way I make value judgments about the available data. Its not binding on anyone else, but I mention it because Omni seems to deny that such an interpretation can legitimately exist. My objections, if any, MUST BE about what I feel is “wrong in society,” or so Omni’s argument presumes.

Getting back to marriage: I personally would not lift a finger to either support or oppose a legislative measure in my state that would license, regulate, and tax same-sex couples, and call what they share a “marriage.” I don’t much care. I have confidence that the First Amendment and over 150 years of jurisprudence on “church autonomy in matters of faith and doctrine” will protect a church from being coerced to conform to some societal dictate. I see good potential that the arguments made by Elane Photography were based on Supreme Court free speech jurisprudence that in the long run will also prevail — whether a majority facilely agree or not — because the constitutional protection against coerced expression is not subject to the whims of an electoral majority.

But, to say, marriage is now the union of any two human beings who love each other, is a CHANGE in the DEFINITION of what constitutes a marriage. It is not a simple matter of nondiscrimination. And it is not constitutionally mandated. (As of now, it is in the practical sense, because five justices so ruled. That’s good law, but then, so is the ruling that a corporation is a “person” protected by the Bill of Rights — which many of us also think was wrongly decided.)

Marriage regulates a biological function that is fundamental to the species. Same sex couples are an irrelevant statistical outlier, of no real concern to anyone except themselves. We each and all might join them in celebrating, or might not. That’s a matter of individual taste or conviction. It has no significance for the general community.

I understand that by running on at such length I risk violating the wise maxim, “Never argue with a fool — people might not be able to tell the difference.” However, there are such a lot of poorly considered axiomatic assertions and emotive expressions flying around in American discourse, disguised as substantive polemic, that I find it worthwhile to sort out the difference. That means I have to do more than say “No, you’re wrong, I’m right.” I have to make my case without saying “I think,” and where I mention what I think, I have to put it in context to serve a demonstrative purpose other than “I think, therefore its true.” I have to dissect in sufficient detail that to discredit my argument a person would have to offer substance, not mere disagreement.

Now moving on the brendan… “they both seem very like trying to legislate other people’s choices.”

Lame. All legislation coerces other people’s choices. Right now in Wisconsin there is an effort to relax local zoning and land use ordinances, because they coerce property owners’ choices. Damn straight, because property owners would otherwise make choices that coerce their neighbor’s choices.

The question is, which choices does government have the assigned jurisdiction to coerce?

Anti-miscegenation laws tried to overtly coerce choices people were otherwise free to make. Marriages laws didn’t intervene in anything. Nobody drafting marriage laws had even thought about same sex couples. They weren’t on the radar.

Hector has proved Giuseppe’s point, in the act of smugly trying to refute him.

North American anti-miscegenation laws are limited to a century or two within one portion of one continent, a rather small slice of human history. Local, and time-bound.

Jewish marriage laws are limited to Jews, and those in immediate contact with Jews, again, a rather small slice of humanity — and written for entirely different purposes. Jewish leaders never claimed that kosher or other Deuteronomic laws were for all of humanity, only for themselves.

Hinduism… different from either anti-miscegenation laws, or Jewish marriage laws, and limited to the Indian sub-continent, where Aryan conquest of the Dravidian population, and rigid division of Aryan society into castes, produces yet another local and time-bound pattern.

Whereas, although there have been many civilizations in which forms of homosexuality had an honored place, nobody in ancient Greece, Persia, Canaan, or Rome ever had the slightest thought that these were the basis of “marriage.”

A point of note: the issue here is not the theological magnitude of the difference between biblical rejection of interracial vs. same-sex marriage.

The question to which I was responding was the legal/societal magnitude and form. The idea that there can be no comparison between opposition to SSM and opposition to interracial marriage because of criminalization of interracial marriage vs. the non-criminialization of SSM ignores the fact that even today there are anti-sodomy laws still on the books.

Additionally, while the American South might be the back-water of a back-water theologically speaking, even if so, the impact of the attitudes of the American South on American politics has been substantial (most states had anti-mixed marriage laws at some point, for example).

Actually, no, Slavery under many aliases was a universal institution in all civilizations. You can search the scrolls of ancient wisdom and morality almost in vain for any objection to it. Euripides had some doubts, and maybe Plato. And the Chinese regent Wang sought to abolish it during the Han interregnum (he failed, spectacularly). Otherwise it’s only in the late 18th century that people started to oppose slavery in toto.

One can also mention female suffrage as something that was all but unthought of in the past– until suddenly everyone agreed to it.

The claim that “X was never done before” is not a good basis for morality, let alone public policy. We’d still be swinging in the tree tops if that were applied consistently.

Actually, yes, when referring to American race-based chattel slavery, which is what tends to draw specious comparisons.

“Additionally, while the American South might be the back-water of a back-water theologically speaking, even if so, the impact of the attitudes of the American South on American politics has been substantial (most states had anti-mixed marriage laws at some point, for example).”

Very true, but let’s not argue that the “Christian” background of the two things is similar. They’re not even close.

My position is that (a) the only reason (most) people care about the definition of marriage is because they think changing it weakens the institution. I have a hard time believing this is controversial–do you go bananas over people who use “begs the question” wrong? … don’t answer that, maybe you do.

I also stated that (b) the objection to interracial marriage was, in fact, strongly couched in biblical terms and social damage–the same objections to SSM from a religious perspective.

I finally (c) don’t see any reason to find the lack of legal consequences for SSM (vs. Loving v. Virginia) to be a conclusive difference when there are unconstitutional anti-sodomy laws on the books today.

It’s all pretty simple, really–I just can’t tell if you addressed any of it.

Finally: “Saying I-think” doesn’t mean “without-reason.” Someone suggested that lack of criminal sanction against SSM made it totally different / incomparable to the criminal sanctions against interracial marriage. I don’t agree–due to the presence of legal-sanction laws that do much the same thing.

Applause! A point of commonality is always welcome. In that case, why do you make so much of a “Loving” analogy, since the main purpose of the analogy is to assert that since states cannot ban inter-racial marriage (that was and is a constitutional argument), therefore ipso facto states must PROVIDE for same-sex marriage (mendaciously stated as “cannot ban gay marriage”)?

“I think” doesn’t mean “without reason.” But if this is an argument, reason must be stated, rather than the pat assertion “I think” being left to speak for itself.

1) The maudlin assertion of constitutional right does violence to the constitution itself and the principles of ordered liberty and judicial review, and,

2) While people who feel themselves to be homosexually motivated have a right to live their lives, and make their own choices, the human species IS heteronormative, and homosexuality is not a big deal, its just something that happens to a small number of people, like cystic fibrosis and being left-handed and having an overactive thyroid.

Rod Dreher, you fall into the liberal frame when you refer to gay “marriage” as an actually existing thing, and you fall into the liberal frame again when you give Kricket Nimmons the female pronoun.

Gay “marriage” doesn’t exist, not in any jurisdiction. Its not a real thing because the gender dichotomy is the central aspect of marriage. These are silly play-acts, lacking the main thing and a hundred corollary things. The biggest losers are the participants themselves, because they deceive themselves into thinking they have something they do not have. And how miserable it must be when they see all that is lacking, but then must keep up the game.

I do believe “transgender” is even more laughable! Have we abandoned biology? Are we amphibians now? To believe in it is to disbelieve in DNA! Once again, the biggest losers are the participants themselves, because they deceive themselves into thinking they are something they are not. They go through amputations and extreme changes only to discover, upon (re) entering the dating market, that they are politely shunned.

Rod Dreher, you have permitted these fictions to take hold of you and become real to you, even if unintentionally. Laugh at these fictions if you can, or keep your mouth shut if you are unable to laugh. But accepting the nonsense of these two things is giving away the fight before you have even started.

As Solzhenitsyn said in Soviet Russia, I will live not by lies. I will not be a channel for them. The least resistance someone can do, Solzhenitsyn noted, is to not help propagate lies, by not repeating them. Unfortunately Mr. Dreher, you haven’t even done that much.

As someone who has no trouble keeping my frame, I can feel superior to many. I feel like Superman, even. My wife is a Superwoman. Truth is incredibly powerful in a world of lies. Why give away your only advantage?

It would be foolish to try to defend such laws on religious grounds. It does however make eminent sense to defend such laws on the basis of public health, since male homosexuality has been and remains one of the most efficient disease pathways. Hundreds of thousands died of AIDS in America alone and male homosexuality was the primary disease vector. The disease profile of male homosexuals is always astonishing to those who have not yet seen the data.